There's nothing sexy about Steve McQueen's Shame. It's a film about loneliness and addiction

Steve McQueen, the director of Shame – his explicit film, released in the UK this Friday, which stars Michael Fassbender as a thirty-something sex addict in New York – described recently how people had asked him, as though in deep bemusement, “How can you make a film about sex addiction which isn’t sexy?” His reply was to reiterate that it was about addiction – the extension of the argument being that an honest portrait of addictive behaviour is rarely attractive, and we don’t expect films about alcoholism or drug use to leave us gasping for a cold Chablis or a hit of heroin.

I’ve seen Shame, and I doubt that many viewers will find it erotic, despite its frequent depictions of sex scenes and the viewing of pornography. Instead, it provokes unease and sadness. This reaction, I think, is exactly what McQueen intended: it’s a film about emotional isolation. Shame is about as far as you could get from a moralising film, and yet it implicitly raises moral questions – can we live without mattering to other people? Is the compulsive pursuit of sex without affection or intimacy simply a way of numbing rather than feeding the soul?

Already, this treatment seems to have confused some early viewers – primarily, I think, because we are used to mainstream Hollywood treatments of sex and the sex industry – think of Showgirls and Striptease – which are invariably served with a side-order of glossy titillation (rather like the endless stream of television documentaries that, despite their dutiful tone of pseudo-investigation into “the sex industry” are mainly excuses to take the slack-jawed viewer on a comprehensive tour of lap-dancing bars).

The sexual revolution has meant that the media now depicts sexual content and behaviour much more openly, but it is nonetheless a very selective and superficial depiction. It tells us a lot about the technicalities of what people are doing, but very little about how they are feeling. A highly active sex life is invariably associated in the media with popularity, desirability and gregariousness: celebrities of all ages rarely tire of telling the public of their sexual zest and stamina, even when no one asked them.

Yet the greatest taboo today is not sex, but loneliness, the silent epidemic of the modern age, to which few sufferers openly admit. McQueen’s unusually honest film has dared to show sexual obsession and loneliness together, as they quite often are. It tells an uncomfortable truth: maybe that’s why so many people will find it so shocking.